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November 10, 2009 - The Flood of ‘09 and Beyond
What a summer 2009 turned out to be!!
As April metamorphosed into May of this year, the River Forecast office of the National Weather Service began issuing reports about the possibility of flood conditions on the Yukon River. The cold weather stayed around until late, and then it turned warm very quickly. What this meant was that a lot of melt water was released all at once from up in the Canadian headwaters, while the ice sheet covering the Yukon down-river in Alaska was slow to melt-- a potentially disastrous combination.
What usually happens when the Yukon River breaks up in May, is that increasing heat from the sun (which increases in strength and day-length by leaps and bounds at that time of year) melts and rots the sometimes five foot thick ice until it is weak and crumbly. It might typically melt to three feet thick, a mass of vertically arrayed hexagonal prisms loosely frozen together that will break apart with a tinkling crash if hit with a sledgehammer. People call it candle ice, or needle ice.
At the same time, the river is slowly rising, lifting the ice sheet free from its bond with the shore and creating a 20 to 60-foot lead of open water along the sides.
At some point, the force of the current tugging at the underside of the ice will move the ice, and the entire surface begins to slide silently by. But-- not for long. Soon some portion of the ice will ride up on a sandbar or island or part of the riverbank, and there will be a massive pileup, the ice sheet breaking up, fracturing, crashing, thundering, booming, shoving up on shore, shearing off trees 8 inches in diameter, and generally demonstrating once again who’s in control here.
Tanana has historically been relatively safe from the flooding that can occur with these big ice jams. But, what “historically” means in this part of the world (where written records have only been kept for about a hundred years) is that 1937 was a bad year, flooding a good part of downtown Tanana. Since then, a few minor floods, but no significant damage.
As May advanced, the warnings from the NWS began ramping up. Ice in an area of the upper Yukon below the town of Eagle was unusually thick because of a peculiar freeze-up the previous fall. Flood watch for Eagle became flood warning for Eagle.
Then, disaster struck. The ice moved and then jammed solidly a few miles below Eagle, and the town, which had not been flooded since 1937 (that date again) was almost completely destroyed. Historical buildings that had stood since almost the beginning of the 20th century were completely destroyed by the ice ramming up on shore, and the town was left in ruins.
If the warnings hadn’t gotten peoples’ attention in Tanana up to this point, they did now. There were meetings in the Tanana Community Hall, with flood maps, escape routes, and people were beginning to seriously consider the possibility that Tanana was not flood proof.
However, human nature always considers hope a viable option, and in this case there is also an element of calculating actual risk that is not as foolhardy as it might appear in retrospect. Its a lot of work to move all of your stuff to high ground, and is it really necessary?
Our house is not on the highest ground in the village, but it is close to that; nonetheless we were taking it seriously. We moved the dogs to a place about a mile away on the side of a hill. We came up with a plan and got survival gear together. We got important papers together in a box ready to go.
As the flood moved down the river, it hit communities unequally. Eagle, which is on a high bank, was destroyed. Circle and Fort Yukon, which are low-lying, were spared. Beaver was mostly spared. Stevens Village was completely flooded. Rampart, 70 miles above Tanana, was close to flooding in some low-lying areas. Now it was our turn.
Through the night, the water level continued to rise ominously. About 4 am, it began to spill over the road up by one of Tanana’s outlying neighborhoods, and one by one the households were woken up into varying degrees of preparedness or befuddlement. At 6 pm it crested, still with no significant damage, and about in sync with the crest upriver in Rampart. A beautiful day was dawning, and as we stood by a fire on the banks of the Yukon river with wall-to-wall ice racing by in front of us, people began to relax and talk how we were probably going to be okay, with our high river bank, etc, etc.
Then the water began to come up again, slowly at first, then with determination, and the camp fire was abandoned as people turned back to evacuation efforts that had temporarily been suspended. Purposeful movement.
About 1 pm, a report come in from a pilot who had just flown the river below Tanana. It was not good news. An ice jam front was located six miles below town, and was ice was reported to be solid for 60 miles below Tanana. As one of my fellow townsmen reported this news to me, I said with feeling, “We’re ------!” He replied, also with feeling, “Yep. We’re ------.”
Now everyone was moving, and the place was like a beehive. No time for careful deliberation what would go and what would stay, if you hadn’t thought about it yet. Everyone was scurrying around like mad trying to save stuff and get trucks loaded and boats moved, with the water raising at the rate of two feet per hour. Many of the mothers with young children and all the elders were evacuated to Fairbanks. We drove our truck with the survival gear off what quickly was becoming an island, and then returned another way by foot to complete moving everything of value upstairs, cable the house off to nearby trees, tie the boat to the front porch, and secure what we could.
Driving the truck out of town, we passed people looking frantic and shell-shocked. It was hard to believe this was really happening, and on such a beautiful, sunny, glorious spring day.
By mid afternoon, we were on an island. We had moved what we could, and there wasn’t much left to do. We had given our teen age kids permission to paddle around down some of the steets in a canoe and help if needed, while we walked over to stand with our neighbors on the bank and contemplate our next move.
It was then we noticed that the ice chunks, which had almost ceased moving as the river became a dammed-up lake, had started to move faster again. Someone noticed that the water level was dropping, slowly at first, then faster, and a cheer went up as we saw that a good part of town and most of the important buildings like the school, clinic, post office, and Elders Residence would escape damage.
Over the next 12 hours the river dropped about 15 feet, leaving behind stranded ice chunks and about six inches of sticky, silty mud. What a mess. About half the houses has sustained some damage, some of it major.
During the next several weeks, every able bodied person was pressed into service to clean up the mess. While cooks made three meals a day for everybody at the school, we disentangled stranded fishwheels, boats and other debris, pushed ice floes off the roads, stripped sodden insulation from below floors and inside walls, and hauled load after load after load of wet household belongings, ruined appliances, furniture to the dump, and washed the rest.
The rest of the summer was employed in rebuilding. The construction season in Tanana is short, and there was no time to lose. We learned all about the arcane workings of FEMA, and did I think a really good job of making the town better than before. We even got a brief visit from former Governor Sarah Palin, prior to her departure for the lecture circuit. (She is more attractive in person, quite petite, and clearly has the politician’s gift for saying the right thing at the right time).
As if this weren’t enough, July saw another record forest fire year, with the town of Nenana in severe danger, and our fish camp under siege from smoke from a big fire 3 miles away. The food cache in the previous entry has probably been destroyed by one of these fires-- which we had occasion to walk through-- it was spectacularly hot and thorough. Burnt everything to a crisp.
While this all might sound like a litany of disaster, we escaped with relatively little damage, for the water and fire approached but did not actually harm us. And, perverse as it might sound, there is a sense of satisfaction in watching two forces of nature that have a long, long tenure in the natural history of Alaska doing their natural thing. The place is still wild, and natural forces still trump our little designs. It’s like a periodic deep cleaning, and you can lament it, or go along with it and marvel at its power.
April 15, 2009
We had a great finish to the winter and kind of a busman’s holiday using the very last of the season.
You can’t count on April as far as traveling goes because you never know when breakup
(melt-down) will occur. With the daylight growing by 7 minute increments per day, sunrise at 6 am and sunset at 10:30 pm, all it takes are a few days at above-freezing temperatures and the snow starts to disappear like magic.
More of a show-stopper is the thawing of ice on creeks and rivers that are either travel routes or that must be crossed to get home.
So for that reason, we never plan too far ahead in April, but just go and see what we can accomplish --- with frequent reference to the weather report. This year, when we went out on April 15, it was going well below freezing at night, and up to about 35 F during the day. We closed down one cabin for the summer, taking all food or breakables out of the cabin and hoisting them up a tree cache in close-able 55 gallon drums, then shuttering all the windows to protect against marauding brown bears.
Then we proceeded up the valley to a small hut where we did some repairs, and closed it down for the summer as well. Since this one was a lightly built frame hut, we took the opposite tack and wedged the door all the way open, with virtually nothing inside. The theory here is, “Come on in”, there’s nothing left to move or beat up-- although sometimes the brown bears will just rip something up a little just for “drill” or material-testing purposes.
By this time, the weather was still in our favor, so we decided to go right up to the very headwaters by the highest peak in the Ray Mountains (Mt Tozi, 5500 feet, which at this elevation is way above the life zone-- rock and lichen only). We had another drum cache which we planned to hoist in a tree up there with food for our summer hikes.
Proceeding up the Tozi River, we at first encountered some overflow water that had come down from upriver and was pooling in the soft snow of a sheltered section of the river. We had to stick to the sandbars and choose our crossings carefully, and in one spot almost got wet in a slushy section.
Soon, however, we had gotten past that and into an area of glare ice, sometimes dry, sometimes with an inch of water flowing over it, and sometimes with a small amount of snow stuck to it. Water had been seeping through cracks out onto the ice all winter, so as a consequence it was many layers of ice thick and quite safe, and sometimes literally from bank to bank between strange rock outcrops. Towards the head of the canyon, the gradient steepens, and you have the real sense of going uphill on a river. But, it was great going.
We got where we were going, and situated the cache up a tree, then went farther upriver just to sight-see. We rounded a corner a few miles upriver, and there, rising like our local version of a holy mountain in the Himalayas, was Mount Tozi, a nearly perfect pyramid framed beautifully by the spruce trees of the river under an intensely blue sky.
We are going to try to make an ascent of Mount Tozi this summer in late July, perhaps with some guests or perhaps by ourselves, and we are very excited by the prospect. It was a great end to our winter.
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